Publishers are doing their virtual E3 announcements, such as Ubisoft Forward and ID@Xbox’s Indie Showcase. There’s other wild news going on, and some not even in the official news items below.
Said news items include:
Let us know what you think.
This week is a celebration of the 250th episode of the Videogame Roundtable, and Dan Quick is back for the special edition, joining fellow PolyCaster Scott Dirk. However, TJ Denzer was at the bowling alley, so he wasn’t available. There’s a lot of Cards Against Humanity and Town of Salem talk, as well as a lot of long-missed byplay between Dan and Jonah Falcon. Unfortunately, Paul Nowak couldn’t make it.
The news this week includes:
Let us know what you think.
Microsoft is on the attack, saying Nintendo has done a great thing with their Wii product line but Microsoft has a bit more “respect” for the new gamers they’re bringing into the industry. Xbox Europe VP David Gosen launched the shot over Nintendo’s bow at the GameFest UK keynote.
“We’ve seen some research that says 60 percent of people who bought a Wii Fit play it once and don’t play it again. So we have to get the balance right, because what we are doing is bringing new consumers into the market for the first time in their lives sometimes—and we have to treat them with respect,” Gosen told attendees. (shacknews)
In translation, developers should be building games with hot gameplay not quirky gimmicks. Basically, he’s of the opinion that Microsoft’s working towards creative unique game play elements and not really concentrating on niche products that are only fun for a week.
Nintendo and others are developing games to take advantage of the Wii Fit board, so not all is lost. As a matter of fact, statistics being gathered by Nintendo’s competitor really don’t hold any weight with us until they’ve references the third party statistics gathering who handled the facts. Otherwise, it’s just PR speak attacking their competitor (although they say Wii isn’t really a competitor) with no real facts or values.
One of the first games I was introduced to on the 2600 was River Raid, back in 1982. I remember it vividly, as I was at my cousin David’s house, who was older than me, and he’d “baby sit” me so the adults could have some adult time hanging out in the dining room. We’d sit in the family room playing 2600, mainly River Raid.
This is an Activision game, and was later ported to Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, C64, ColecoVision, IBM PCjr, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons (for versions after the Atari 2600). By flying over fuel-stations, the plane’s tank can be refilled. The player can shift side to side and change the speed of the plane. Sections of the river are marked by bridges.
The game was highly acclaimed for its ability to stuff tons of map into small amounts of space. The map was huge and it fit on the disk because it’s randomly generated using a common starting seed, basically, imagine some of the Diablo dungeons…they’re randomly generated but the starting seed which starts the random process is also ‘random.’ (probably based on clock time which isn’t too uncommon). Atari, rather than try to make a random level each time used the level random generator to build a procedural based level rather than drawing it and saving it into the cart. GENIUS.
A more highly randomized number generation system was used for enemy AI to make the game less predictable.
Germany consider this game harmful to children, indexing it on their list of games “harmful for children” along with the game Speed Racer. It remained on their list until 2002 (since 1984) when developers petitioned it off the list before the PS2 launch of Activision Anthology (otherwise they’d not be able to put it in the game)
Some of the Germany reasons: Minors are intended to delve into the role of an uncompromising fighter and agent of annihilation (…). It provides children with a paramilitaristic education (…). With older minors, playing leads (…) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (…) and headaches (wikipedia)
All in all, a great game! To hear all the details on River Raid and our opinions, checkout TD Gaming Podcast Episode 78.
